Mozilla CEO Chris Beard stated in an interview that the organization is planning to offer premium services in the near future. Firefox Premium would be a bundle of services which may include elements such as online storage and VPN, which would increase user’s safety and privacy on the internet.
Beard stated:
We also tested VPN. We can tell if you’re on a public Wi-Fi network and want to do online banking and say, “Wow, you really should use VPN.” You can imagine we’ll offer a solution that gives us all a certain amount of free VPN Bandwidth and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription. We want to add more subscription services to our mix and focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues.
Premium add-ons might include some form of cloud storage as well as integrated VPN features.
With Chrome, Safari and Edge all offering improvements on a regular basis, Mozilla is trying hard to keep Firefox as one of the best browsers on the market.
And to be fair to Firefox it’s not standing still – this year we’ve seen improvements in privacy controls and optimized loading times roll out too. The huge collection of extensions and add-ons is another reason to pick Firefox as a daily browser.
Just last week the standalone Firefox Lockwise desktop password manager was rolled out, giving users an even easier way to keep on top of their website logins.
However, it’s still not clear exactly what a premium Firefox tier would include, or how much it would cost – Mozilla itself probably isn’t sure at this stage but it’s something to watch out for later in the year.